The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Encryption technologies, such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS), are used for transporting information across packet networks. However, this prevents devices, such as corporate edge devices and firewalls, from looking at the unencrypted information being communicated therein. To avoid this situation, these edge devices sometimes act as a transparent proxy in the middle of the communication between the endpoints. This intermediate device establishes a secure connection with each of the two endpoints, and transparently bridges these connections. To accomplish this, the intermediate device receives the encrypted information on a first session from the first endpoint, decrypts it using a key associated with the first session, possibly examines it to determined that is allowed (if not then prevents it from being forwarded to the second endpoint), encrypts the information using a second key associated with the second session, and forwards this second encrypted information to the other endpoint. To the endpoints, their connection appears to span end-to-end with the other endpoint.